Puccini's Ghosts by Morag Joss

CWA Silver Dagger Award winner Morag Joss peers into the soul of a wounded family in this haunting, harrowing masterpiece of psychological suspense. With equal parts subtlety and menace, Joss takes us on a dizzying journey toward a collision between fantasy and reality—and an astounding moment of revelation that shatters illusions, hopes, and lives forever.

The year is 1960. The place is a Scottish seaside town utterly devoid of culture and charm. Here, Lila lives as the third player in her parents’ dramatically embittered marriage. Until her flamboyant, irrepressible uncle George shows up from London and her family decides to squander a windfall on the most preposterous of causes: a civic production of the Puccini opera Turandot.

Lila knows nothing of opera and little of her uncle or the dashing young man he hires to sing the role of Calaf. But Lila does know passion. Because it’s coursing through her veins—and rushing blindly, wildly all around her. Now a girl on the verge of womanhood is about to blunder into a grown-up world where secrets are kept and exposed, hopes soar and wither, and where crimes petty and great exact the most chilling punishments of all.

Morag Joss grew up on the west coast of Scotland. Her first Sara Selkirk novel, Funeral Music, was nominated by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association for the Dilys Award for the years favorite mystery. Her fourth novel, Half Broken Things, won the 2003 CWA Silver Dagger Award. Morag Joss lives in the country outside the city of Bath and in London.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Puccini's Ghosts

Publishers Weekly

At the start of British author Joss's somber fifth novel of psychological suspense, opera singer Lila du Cann (né e Eliza Duncan) returns to her childhood home on the Scottish coast to bury her estranged father.

Book Reporter

Following the death of her elderly father, opera singer Lila du
Cann (a stage-name reinvention of her original name, Eliza Duncan)
returns to Burnhead, the gray, rainy, dreary Scottish town of her
childhood to arrange for his funeral and to put his affairs in
order.